If it weren’t for the war that we just became involved with in Libya more people might have noticed that we just passed the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. It’s been eight years since Bush the Younger’s staged press conference in the East Room of the White House, eight years since the failure of “shock and awe”, eight years since everybody knew there were chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq because . . . duh, of course there are. Now that the number of American troops continues to dwindle, and even the most enduring of our enduring camps are being disassembled and incinerated, this may be, at long last, the final anniversary of the Iraq War.
Given the dictator deposing wave of humanity currently sweeping the greater Middle East, anything is possible in the nine months until December 31st, the date all (government) American forces are to be withdrawn. But it seems unlikely that any amount of upheaval in Baghdad would result in an Iraqi government that wanted American troops to stay, and it’s even less likely that President Obama would have any interest even if such a thing did occur. And even though plenty of heavily armed and amped up mercenaries may stay behind in the hopes of collecting various paychecks, they won’t be able to play with their guns behind the shield of extraterritoriality any longer. Add the withdrawal of the real troops to the rescinding of immunity for the hired guns and, by this time next year, Iraq will be basically under its own control again, for better or worse.
Our departing from the land between the rivers will come not a moment too soon for us. While we have destroyed Iraq from top to bottom, we have not escaped significant damage ourselves, beyond even the usual measures of money spent, limbs lost and lives ended. Eight years is a long time, it’s longer than most cultural trends last, it’s longer than most television shows stay on the air, it’s the time a precocious ten year-old kid takes to become an eighteen year-old adult.
One can’t help but think of that last point when reading about our latest foray into war crimes in our other Asian adventure. Seymour Hersh (via):
Der Spiegel reported this week that it had obtained four thousand photographs and videos taken by American soldiers who referred to themselves as a “kill team.” (Der Spiegel chose to publish only three of the photographs.) The images are in the hands of military prosecutors. Five soldiers, including Jeremy Morlock, the smiling man in the picture, who is twenty-two years old, are awaiting courts-martial for the murder of three Afghan civilians; seven other soldiers had lesser, related charges filed against them, including drug use. On Tuesday, Morlock’s lawyer said that he would plead guilty.
Twenty-two years old! Some very simple math tells you that the American soldier who just pleaded guilty to the murder of Afghanis for sport was little more than eleven or twelve for the 2001 terrorist attacks. He’d probably barely begun masturbating when Bush the Younger blundered into Baghdad, and he spent his hormone addled years awash in propaganda about made up crap like “Islamo-fascism” and “fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here”.
Maybe Jeremy Morlock was always an asshole, maybe he was one of those kids who grew up torturing small animals and setting fires, maybe the frat boy warrior culture in which he came of age had no meaningful effect on him. But one thing’s for sure, the kids we launched our little crusade to protect are now being destroyed by it, even if they survive. Worse, even though there may be no Iraq anniversary in 2012, there certainly will be an Afghan one, and it won’t be some single digit number like eight. It will be eleven and counting.
